Turning slowly, he oriented himself with the outside landscape. Above his head was the boulder-strewn plateau. To his left would be the pig’s snout, the cliff that was framed by the shadowy boar tusks. To his right, he spotted a pair of tunnel entrances that looked like the twin barrels of a shotgun. He imagined they led deeper into the higher plateaus that extended behind the boar’s head.

Shining his light across the floor, he also saw evidence of prior habitation, washed up along the walls’ edges. He spotted broken furniture that could have once been tables or beds. His beam picked out a couple of bayonets oxidized to black.

As in the cave at Klipkoppie, Tucker pictured the ghosts of soldiers coming and going here, sitting around tables lit with oil lamps, polishing those bayonets, joking and exchanging war stories.

Eyeing the shotgun tunnels, he wanted to explore further, to see where they might lead, but now was not the time to go wandering by himself.

He stared at the rope whipping within the cascade of water and sighed.

He needed the others.

Going up proved a hundredfold harder than the descent. Hand over hand, he hauled himself through the pounding cascade, out the hole, and back to the surface of the pool. Exhausted, he waded back to the rim and threw himself flat on the bank. He rolled to his back and let the sun warm him.

“Tucker?” Anya dropped to her knees next to him. “Are you okay?”

Kane came up on his other side, nosing him fiercely, half greeting, half scolding.

“What’s down there?” Anya asked.

He only grinned at her and said, “You’ll see.”

5:23 P.M.

“Bless you, my boy!” Bukolov said by the bank of the pond. “And your dog!”

It took some effort to get the good doctor atop the plateau, but he proved fitter than he appeared. Even Christopher, after resting while Tucker took the plunge into the unknown, was walking more solidly on his left leg. He made it up the boulder staircase without any assistance.

Bukolov continued. “We stand at the entrance to De Klerk’s cave! At the threshold of discovering the greatest boon known to mankind!”

Tucker allowed the doctor to wax purple and lay on the hyperbole.

For in fact, they had done it.

Christopher and Anya chuckled, standing next to the doctor.

Tucker stood off by the cliff’s edge, inventorying the supplies they had shuttled up here by rope. There were still a few last items he wanted, but he could haul those by hand.

Straightening, he called to the others. “I’m going for another run to the Rover while we have daylight!”

He was acknowledged, but before he could step away, a buzzing rose from his pack. He fished out his satellite phone and answered.

“Tucker, I’m glad I could reach you.” The tension in Harper’s voice was obvious.

“What’s wrong?”

“Where were you?”

“Down a hole. At De Klerk’s coordinates. We found it. We found the—”

“Who’s with you?”

“Everyone.”

“How close?” she pressed.

“Fifty feet.” Tucker withdrew farther from the others, sensing the need for privacy. He put a boulder between him and the others. “Now sixty feet. What’s the matter?”

“We deconstructed that photo you sent—the one of you sitting at the computer in the Internet café in Dimitrovgrad. It was shopped. It’s a fake. Don’t ask me to explain the technicalities, but there were pixel defects in the image—something called integration artifacts.”

“Go on.”

“Integration artifacts are created when you extract part of one image and overlay it onto another. You follow?”

“Like replacing a horse’s ass with your boss’s face. I get it. Out with it.”

“The photo of you at the Internet café was created by merging two different images. An interior shot of the café. And a photo of you taken elsewhere. Someone shopped them together. Faked it.”

“What the hell?”

“Our techs were able to separate out the original photo of you, and through extrapolation and pixel capture, they were able to rebuild some of the old details that were erased, mostly details around your hands. In the faked photo, your hands are hovering over a computer keyboard. But when the techs were done, they showed your hands were really originally holding a steering wheel.”

“So the picture of me that was Photoshopped was actually taken while I was driving.”

“Exactly. It appears to have been taken by a cell-phone camera. It was a side profile of you, as if someone in the passenger seat shot it.”

It took several pained seconds for Tucker’s brain to register what Harper was telling him. He squeezed his eyes shut, her last words echoing in his mind.

. . . a side profile of you, as if someone in the passenger seat shot it . . .

“What was I wearing in the photo? I can’t remember.”

“Uh . . . a military winter suit.”

That was the jacket he wore when he pulled Anya out of the Kazan Kremlin. After that, they fled the city. He pictured that ride.

Bukolov and Utkin had been sitting in the back.

Anya had been up front with him—in the passenger seat.

Tucker whispered, “It’s Anya.”

He closed his eyes, despairing. She must have covertly taken the photo with her cell phone as he drove them out of Kazan, then e-mailed it away before he ditched everyone’s electronics.

He had to recalibrate his entire worldview of events—and brace a hand against the boulder to keep his legs steady.

She had lied about just getting tea in Dimitrovgrad. While loose, she must have made contact with Kharzin’s people, told them where to arrange the Spetsnaz ambush. She must have also covertly followed Tucker, noted he had used that Internet café. Kharzin’s people took advantage of that information to create the doctored photo. It was insurance, a red herring. It had been planted on the Spetsnaz people in case their ambush failed. In that worst-case scenario, Tucker was meant to find the photo, so he would believe the attackers had been tailing them or tracking them all along, so as to throw off suspicion from Anya.

But that was not the worst of it.

Utkin.

He suddenly found it hard to breathe. He felt sucker punched in the gut. He pictured the man bleeding to death on the beach, sacrificing himself to save them, the same people who had falsely accused and condemned him.

Still, you saved us.

And it had never been Utkin. Anya had set him up. The signal generator was hers. The empty pack of cards in Utkin’s bag was hers. She knew Utkin would have a set of cards. It was easy enough to plant that evidence in his duffel.

Harper’s voice blared in his ear, drawing him back to his own skin. “Tucker!”

“I’m here.” He took a deep breath. “It’s Anya. She’s the one working with Kharzin. I should have seen it.”

“There’s no way you could have.”

“Either way, we have to assume she’s been in contact with Kharzin’s people since we touched down in Africa. She was with me when I found Grietje’s Well. She knew the GPS coordinates to this spot. Which means Kharzin has them, too.”

“Then that means you’re likely to have company soon,” Harper said. “What’re you going to do?”

“We’ve found the cave, but not the specimens of LUCA.”

“That doesn’t leave you many options.”

“Just one. Get Bukolov into the cave and let him go to work. While he’s doing that, I’ll get ready for a siege and rig the cave with C-4. If we can’t hold off Felice and her team, I’ll blow it all to hell.”

There was a long silence on her end. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” she finally said. “What about Anya? What are you going to do with her?”

“In the short term, I haven’t decided yet.”

“And the long term?”

He pictured Utkin’s face. “I don’t see her having a long term.”